SMH to kick off 185th anniversary celebrations

Australia’s oldest, continuously published newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald will celebrate its 185th anniversary next week with a series of events and editorial coverage. The celebrations will kick off on Monday with a 16-page wrap in The Sydney Morning Herald that will feature articles by some of Fairfax’s celebrated journalists, photo essays, quizzes and history...

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Australia’s oldest, continuously published newspaper The Sydney Morning Herald will celebrate its 185th anniversary next week with a series of events and editorial coverage.

The celebrations will kick off on Monday with a 16-page wrap in TheSydney Morning Herald that will feature articles by some of Fairfax’s celebrated journalists, photo essays, quizzes and history about Sydney, Australia and the paper itself.

The editorial coverage will continue throughout the week in print and online.

A 185th Anniversary landing webpage will be launched as a hub for all relevant content which will include multimedia features and a video featuring Herald subscribers talking about what they enjoy about the paper.

Each evening of the week beginning Monday, April 18, special subscriber-only events also will also be held at Fairfax’s office in Pyrmont.

The events will take the form of Q&A sessions with the Herald’s senior writers and columnists: sports journalist Peter FitzSimons, investigative journalists Adele Ferguson and Kate McClymont, economics columnist Ross Gittins and the paper’s editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir.

The events have already sold out but video recordings of the session will become available online.

“They feel as though they own it in a way, they feel as though it is their paper and they have that tremendous connection to it. And I think that has never gone and The Sydney Morning Herald will be there as long as that remains.”

The Sydney Morning Herald was first published as the weekly The Sydney Herald on April 18, 1831.

The paper was acquired 10 years later by John Fairfax, whose family controlled the paper for 149 years before mounting debt saw the Fairfax Group acquired by Canadian media baron Conrad Black and then re-listed on the stock exchange in 1992.

The paper launched smh.com.au in 1995, moved from broadsheet to compact format in 2013 and has undergone a dramatic transition in the past few years with an increased focus on digital and most recently an editorial restructure.